Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday April 06, 2010 @10:13PM
from the doin'-what-we-always-did dept.

derrida writes "After more than 4 years C is back at position number 1 in the TIOBE index. The scores for C have been pretty constant through the years, varying between the 15% and 20% market share for almost 10 years. So the main reason for C's number 1 position is not C's uprise, but the decline of its competitor Java. Java has a long-term downward trend. It is losing ground to other languages running on the JVM. An example of such a language is JavaFX, which is now approaching the top 20."

"Java has a long term downward trend". Wrong. For one, C and Java share the same "downward trend" from 2002 (earliest year on the chart) and 2007. From 2007 to late last year, both C and Java basically stay about the same. Only in the last 6 months or so can you say Java has been doing down and C rising.

Amusingly enough, the interpreters/compilers for all those languages were originally developed in C and/or C++.

It would have been rather hard for the original Lisp compiler to be written in C since it predates the existence of C by almost a decade. Not to mention how for a decade or more that Lisp was pretty much running only on Lisp machines that were built to natively execute Lisp code. And most of the original Smalltalk implementations were also not written in C.

As the CTO of a major global tier one financial services and banking group I manage tons of different software technologies (not to mention the various computing platforms that software has to run on), ranging from Cobol and Java on mainframes to C and TCL on point of sale and EFT terminals through to Java, C# and Visual Basic on servers and ATMs... and of course all the scripting and interpreted languages in between.

I am a dyed in the wool Java person (I personally developed the group's core banking frame work in Java when I still headed up the groups IT architecture division).

I am now a strong advocate for data centre simplification by standardising on.NET for customer facing and branch teller systems (all our teller systems still run on a custom build of OS/2, would you believe)

In my personal capacity (I run a successful independent software development firm as a hobby), I am sold on Embarcadero RAD Studio 2010. To be fair I have been a Delphi fan since version 1 (well since Turbo Pascal 6.0, if you really must know). But switched professionally to Java when JBuilder took off.

Delphi will never enjoy the market position it enjoyed in its heydays... but it remains the staple of the ISV. Lots of software that we use every day is developed using Delphi, ranging from Skype, the Winter Olympics 2010 Rings, Macromedia HomeSite, QuickBooks Point of Sale, Total Commander, Installaware, Yahoo! Go for TV, MySQL Administrator, Dev-C++, TurboCASH , StarUML, SharpE , Cobian Backup, PocoMail, Jabber, XPlite, DynDNS Updater, MultiEdit, SQL Litspeed, CoffeeCup HTML Editor, Windows Shell Extension for M4A music files, PL/SQL Developer and thousands of other software systems that we use every day and take for granted.

So when I started playing with RAD studio 2010, I was impressed at the versatility of the suite. I can do everything from full on.NET (framework 3.5) software development using Microsoft Visual Studio and the Delphi Prism personality to traditional Win32 development. I can even do high performance stuff by taking advantage of the inline assembler and inter-mingling assembly code with my Delphi code. Last night I was impressed that Microsoft tools such as WSDL.exe and XSD.exe were able to generate Delphi code for me to create.NET web services using Delphi directly in Microsoft Visual Studio.

So with Delphi, I have the best of all worlds, and it shouldn't be surprising that as the climate for the independent software developer is getting brighter, we should see a resurgence of those tools that give small development teams platform and technology optionality.